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Your skin is home to a thousand kinds of bacteria, and how they contribute to healthy skin is still largely a mystery. This mystery may be getting more complicated: An article published Thursday in the journal Cell Host & MicrobeExamining the many strains of Cutibacterium acnes bacteria on 16 volunteers, the researchers discovered that each pore was a world in itself. Each pore contained only one type of C. acne.
C. acnes occurs naturally and is the most abundant bacteria on the skin. Tami Lieberman, a professor at MIT and author of the new paper, said the link to the skin disease acne isn’t clear. If biologists want to uncover the relationship between the inhabitants of your face and its health, it will be an important step to understand whether the various strains of C. acnes have abilities or niches of their own, and how the strains are distributed across your skin.
Dr. Lieberman and colleagues used commercially available nose strips and old-fashioned squeezing with a tool called a comedone extractor to collect their samples. They then smeared samples, each somewhat resembling a microscopic glacial core, through pores in Petri dishes. They did the same with samples of toothpicks rubbing against the surface of the forehead, cheeks, and back of the participants, who collected bacteria living on the surface of the skin instead of the pores. They let the bacteria grow, then sequenced their DNA to identify them.
Each person’s skin had a unique combination of strains, but what surprised the researchers most was that each pore contained only one type of C. acne. The pores were also different from their neighbors – for example, there was no clear pattern connecting the pores of the left cheek or forehead among the volunteers.
Moreover, judging by the sequencing data, the bacteria within each pore were essentially the same.
“There’s so much variation in one square centimeter of your face,” said postdoctoral researcher Arolyn Conwill, who is the lead author of the study. “But there’s a complete lack of diversity in one of your pores.”
What scientists think is that each pore is descended from a single individual. Dr. Lieberman said pores are deep, narrow cracks with oil-secreting glands underneath. If a C. acnes cell manages to land there, it can multiply until it fills the pores with copies of itself.
This also explains why species that do not grow very quickly manage to avoid competition by faster species on the same individual. They do not compete with each other; They live side by side in their own walled garden.
Scientists, interestingly, think that these gardens are not very old. They speculate that the founder cells in the pores they examined settled down only about a year ago.
What happened to the bacteria that lived there before? Researchers don’t know—maybe they were destroyed by the immune system, caught in viruses, or were unexpectedly attracted by a nose strip, paving the way for new founders.
Dr. The finding has implications for broader microbiome research, Lieberman said. For example, taking a simple swab of someone’s skin never implies the complexity uncovered in this study. As scientists ponder the possibility of manipulating our microbiomes to help treat disease, the patterns uncovered in this study imply a need for information about the location and arrangement of microbes, not just their identities. In the future, if doctors hope to replace someone’s current skin inhabitants with others, they may need to clean their pores first.
And could another creature on our face be playing a role in the coming and going of bacteria in every pore?
Dr. “We have mites on our face that live in the pores and eat bacteria,” Lieberman said. What role do they play in this ecosystem in caring for C. Acnes’ gardens?, has not yet been determined.
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